Peryco: Comparison Shopping Engines take on the beauty industry

The proliferation of online commerce has allowed consumers to have much faster access to information about the products they want to purchase. And that they can also make pre-orders before their purchase comes to fruition. What encourages the comparison of products, models, brands, points of sale and, above all, are their prices.

To make things easier for us and not have to visit multiple platforms, the comparison shopping engines were created. And in 2016, Peryco -a synonym of Perfumery and Cosmetics- comes to cover a sector in which practically none existed then: that of beauty.

Consola de Peryco.

In a first phase the price of perfumes is compared, but when coming in different sizes we must also value the quantity in each bottle. “People tend to think that the more, the cheaper, but in perfumery that is not always true,” explains Manel Soto, CEO and founder, along with his brother Jordi and Sandra Pena, Peryco.

When talking about comparing perfumes, we are not talking about comparing fragrances, but about which of the containers contains the highest concentration. We have two types mainly: an EDT (Eau de Toilette) or an EUP (Eau de Parfum). “There are no concentration values established by the industry, but there are ranges,” says Manel. And in this way, an EDT has less concentration than an EDP. It will be our decision, under our personal smelling sense to choose which of the two types we want.

In addition to fragrances and cosmetics, Peryco is also incorporating offers at beauty centers. Today it has 100 centers, but they expect to reach 2,000 in March.

The origin of the idea, like so many others, comes from Manel’s own experience when searching online for a perfume to give away at Christmas. Both he and his brother Jordi, both from the web scraping for other brands (technique used to get information from a website), realized that there was no tool to facilitate the enormous work of comparing prices.

The company, which operates in Spain with a monthly traffic of 60,000 people, is ready to go abroad. The web is already set up and the expansion to France under a new brand, Wibeti, was imminent. Later, they will tackle Latin America, with Mexico, Brazil and Chile as their main areas.

And although they have received funding from the accelerator of Via Galicia, they need it as an important cushion to start the company and start outsourcing services. «Here you have to know how to do everything, but quality is well paid».

For them, the future and essence of Peryco lies in moving from a comparing shopping engine to a community, and from there to a market.

Many Galician companies have found through innovation a perfect tool to challenge the current global economic crisis. (I+E) Innovar para Emprender —Innovate to Learn in Spanish— is a new series of jornalistic reports integrated in the scientific culture, technology and part of the FECYT. The project has the full financial and logistic back up of the Axencia Galega de Innovación—The Innovation Galician Agency.